Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City [Hardcover]

Tristram Hunt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2005

Victorian cities, so long the object of derision as a byword for deprivation, are now celebrated as an urban ideal. They are widely heralded among modern planners and politicians for their active citizenship, local democracy, and civic spirit. This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the reaction led by Macaulay and Mill, who were repelled by the faux medievalism of the early Victorian years and who championed progress and industry; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing, especially in Joe Chamberlain's Birmingham; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. We think we have culture wars today, but our world is peaceful compared to 19th-century England as portrayed by Hunt in this comprehensive study of the emergence of the modern city. Hunt, a historian at the University of London, examines the many antagonistic political and aesthetic movements vying for dominance as the Victorian city took shape. In the 1830s, rural masses migrating to the industrial cities found rampant disease, extreme want and a life expectancy as low as 30 years. In response, some argued nostalgically for a return to medieval patterns of life or a resurgence of Saxon traditions of local autonomy. Others preached a municipal gospel, stressing a duty of serving the community through public office or participating in the myriad voluntary associations created to promote education, public health and the morality of the working poor. Hunt devotes lively chapters to these and other responses to Victorian urban life. He finds that none provided a lasting solution, as the cities of England and Scotland sank into drab suburbanism in thrall to the "metropolitan imperialism" of London. Demonstrating a remarkable command of literature, political history and architectural criticism, Hunt (who is all of 31) brings a long-departed era vigorously to life. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Jan. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

This fun, if meandering, intellectual history of city-building in Victorian Britain traces the evolution of grim industrialized towns, with their "rat-haunted slums" and "vomiting chimneys," through their heyday as wealthy cultural centers, and beyond. Hunt relates how a newly prosperous middle class, eager to legitimatize its economic power and distance itself from accusations of philistinism, began "manufacturing a new cultural identity," in which architecture and government reflected social and moral values. Using various models—from the buccaneering "municipal gospel" of Joseph Chamberlain to the example of Renaissance Florence, with its traditions of self-government and public design—the Victorians created the Age of Great Cities. No model was wholly successful in combatting the miserable living conditions of the poor, and an "anti-civic" solution—the suburbs—signalled the end of "urbs triumphant." Yet, Hunt argues, aspects of the Victorian framework hold valuable lessons for revivifying contemporary cities.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson (March 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0297607677
• ISBN-13: 978-0297607670
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,573,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Transforming England's "Dark Satanic Mills", February 1, 2006

By 

Peter Kobs "Peter Kobs" (Battle Creek, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Building Jerusalem (Paperback)

Britain was the first country on Earth to witness the Industrial Revolution -- and my, oh, my was it ugly! Millions of economically displaced families moved from the countryside and Ireland to work in the burgeoning cotton, metal and coal industries during the early 19th century. Cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds were completely overwhelmed by the human influx, becoming breeding places for mass poverty and the disease that followed. The living conditions were nothing less than murderous -- as bad as anything in the Third World today.

In this college-level book, Tristram Hunt chronicles how British society responded to the crisis. "Building Jerusalem" is an intellectual history of the ideas that transformed squalor-bound urban areas into a new organizational model based on civic pride and public works. We learn how the Romantic vision of medieval chivalry (as retold in popular novels like "Ivanhoe") influenced the ground-level urban activists -- along with powerful forms of Christian compassion and nationalism.

The Victorian urban reform movement succeeded in many areas, but fell short in others. Ultimately, the coming of the 20th century undermined many of the core ideas that sustained the movement and led to a new focus on suburban development instead.

Hunt's writing is lively, particularly in the first 200 pages, and his research is impeccable. Unfortunately, the second half of the book drags a bit as he delves too deeply into the biographies of certain key characters, like John Ruskin. I would have split this book into two different volumes, the first from 1770 to about 1880, the second volume from 1880 to 2000. The photos are valuable, but we need more maps, illustrations and graphics to understand the true nature of this earth-shaking transformation. Bottom line: Worth reading, but could be better organized.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary!!!!!!!, January 19, 2006

By 

M. Brust (Denton, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Hardcover)

Historians must take an ideological stance or they become but poor reporters of facts. Hunt's research and approach is brilliant. Whether you agree with him on his interpretation of the facts is your business. Great history is written with great passion. This book is a very fine example of the rare art of the historian.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched, but flawed account of Victorian cities, August 14, 2004

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Hardcover)

Hunt, a university lecturer and government adviser, has written a considerable work, based on years of research, but flawed by its pro-Labour, anti-working class perspective. He quotes John Prescott, "We are all middle class" - true enough of Labour Ministers and their cronies.

But the world's first industries and the world's first industrial cities were built by the world's first working class. In this book, trade unions are almost invisible - a walk-on part when Manchester Town Hall opened in 1878, a demand for better conditions for Glasgow's tramworkers, but Hunt cannot see the working class's role in creating industry, only `restrictive labour practices'.

He approves the Victorian economist James Mill's arrogant and idealist claim that the capitalist class contains `the heads that invent, and the hands that execute' and `the men who in fact think for the rest of the world'. The reactionary diatribes of Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin, and the bourgeois triumphalism of a Macaulay, were equally idealist.

Too often, Victorian capitalists had prestige projects built, at the cost of urban development, putting palaces before people. Self-styled merchant princes, seeing themselves as the new Medici, romanced `Saxon self-government' and smugly rejected planning for public health.

The Victorian ruling class saw London as the imperial city, with its irredeemable natives. Hunt sees people's moves to the suburbs and to garden cities as wilful failures to solve London's problems, and joins Betjeman, Orwell, Williams-Ellis and Priestley in snobbish hatred of the suburbs, despite acknowledging that many people do want to live there.

Hunt calls for a restoration of local democracy, noting that in the 1890s, Londoners elected 12,000 of their fellow-citizens to run hospitals, schools and transport; now 36,000 quangocrats decide for us. Successive governments' rate capping, surcharging and cash limits have weakened the `innovative local government and civic pride' that Hunt celebrates, yet he ignores completely the biggest current threat to local (and national) democracy - Labour's EU-driven regionalisation policy.

He applauds the knowledge economy - though isn't all productive work knowledge-based? But we also need steel, ships, vehicles and clothes, which we should be producing ourselves, instead of relying on imported goods.